~ Daily musings from a slightly bent brain.

Let’s take a break from politics

It’s a BEYOOOOTIFUL Western New York Fall-like morning. It’s only 49 degrees but the sun is brilliant in the sky, the leaves on the trees are starting their color transformation, the morning dew is very heavy, and the crisp air tends to put a little bit of a zip in your stride. Football weather!

Speaking of football, I went 11-5 in the picks for week one. I was surprised to see Atlanta trounce Detroit the way they did. I was completely stunned to see Buffalo act like a team that wanted to play football and they kicked the ever-lovin’ shit out of Seattle much to the chagrin of my nephew, who is a Seahawks fan, and was at the game. Sorry Alex! No big surprise that Tennessee beat Jacksonville (even though I picked the Jags to win). San Diego losing to Carolina wasn’t any huge surprise, either. But the big surprise was how badly Indianapolis played Chicago. Peyton Manning coming back from knee surgery, not having taken one snap during the pre-season, didn’t really look all that rusty and his timing looked good. It’s just that the Bears defense came out like a monster and stayed on Manning the whole game.

I hate the first week, though. It’s hard to gauge how the teams are going to do with the personnel changes they’ve gone through during the off season. However, the addition of Favre to the Jets coupled with the season-ending injury to Tom Brady is going to change the complexion of the game in the AFC East now. (possibly). How will New England adjust? How close to 100% is Manning? How will Kerry Collins do in his starting role with the Titans now that Vince Young is out for a while?

We’re heading down to my sister’s place on Saturday to do more canning and putting up of our garden produce. We’ll can some stewed tomatoes. Lisa wants to make some tomato juice. I’d like to try our own version of V-8. We’re also going to do some spaghetti sauce too. It seems we have tomatoes coming out the wazoo. We have regular beefsteak tomatoes, but we also have the Romo tomatoes, as well as red and yellow cherry tomatoes.

Also ready to be put up are onions and peppers. We don’t really have enough corn to bother with canning or anything. We only had 54 stalks to start with and, with only 1 or 2 ears per stalk, between the two families, there’s just not enough to bother with. So, we’ll pick that and eat it fresh. Acorn squash, watermelon and pumpkins are also ready to pick. Lisa plans to cook and can pumpkin as well.

Then of course there’s still zucchini and cukes. The green and yellow beans are pretty well spent, as is the broccoli.

Our FoodSaver shit the bed a couple of weeks ago. I was completely distraught, since we had just gotten more cauliflower and had broccoli to put up as well. The vacuum wasn’t working — in fact, it seemed like it was putting air into the bag instead of sucking it out. So, the next day Lisa called the company. They went through a couple of things with her and gave her the “bad news, good news” thing.

Bad news: It’s defective. We need to send it in and we’ll be without our foodsaver.

Good news: The model we have has been discontinued so they’re going to replace it with an “upgraded” model.

So, Lisa packaged it up, sent it to the company and we got our new, upgraded model on Monday. Nice! Very nice!

That about wraps it up — it’s nice to have a mundane day now and then, isn’t it?